File:Reflections on the new Machine Age — technology, inequality and the economy (16620787618).jpg

The jobs of scribes... at the future of work gathering that I hosted at work. (background <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/16620787618/#comment72157710374946917">below</a>)

Opening: "Technology is driving an economic transformation. The effects on wealth and income are already significant, and emerging technologies promise greater effects in the coming decade. While the economic pie is bigger than ever, wages for the median worker in America and other advanced nations have stagnated, increasing inequality. Not everyone is participating in our economy’s bounty, and many of those left behind are becoming angry or disillusioned. With more powerful technologies available than ever before, the challenge before us is to create a better society than ever before."

Some comments, without attribution: “We have an aging society. Mature people and societies want to get rid of risk. There are huge economic costs to decreasing risk.”

On the risk of AI: “If current trends continue, people are going to rise up before the machines.”

“When thinking about education for all, you want your competitors and the people you fight wars against to be educated. The alternative is ISIS.”

Something that occurred to me midway: many of the new jobs in the new economy (like Uber drivers and Mechanical Turkers) are at the edge of automation, and thus, are ever so ephemeral against the march of Moore’s Law.

We hope to pull a lot of it together into an open letter. On the whiteboard, we started with the 200-year endgame and pondered utopian and dystopian futures, long past the debates on transition times (e.g., robots can do anything physical better than a human by then). And we tried to come up with business/gov't/social movement ideas to address the path dependence of where we are today and were we hope we can go.